Improving Your Online Community Engagement

Developing an actively engaged online community is perhaps one of the dreams of a community manager and website owner. This online community facilitates discussions about your products, services or industry, as well as share knowledge about product how-to’s and troubleshooting. A blog is an excellent way to develop an online community – one that is at interested and passionate about your products and brand. Remember, reader engagement will lead to more leads and consequently, higher sales conversions.

Here are some ways for you to improve the engagement levels of your online community:

• Produce informative, interesting and share-worthy content. Your blog content should elicit interest and reactions from your readers – one that will interest them enough to comment on your blog entries and share them on their social media sites. This can be entries that are funny or emotionally touching, informative tutorials or surveys.
• Produce content regularly. At the very least, produce one or two blog posts a week, to give your readers a reason to come back to your blog and website. If you do not produce anything, your readers may lose interest and forget you altogether.
• Work for relevance. To encourage interaction and engagement, provide content that is relevant and up-to-date. Strive to get the latest on your industry and on related news. You can also ask your readers to provide suggestions about topics they want you to cover. Better yet, do this in a form of a survey, where those who complete the survey also get freebies or a chance to win a certain prize.
• Encourage interaction. Create an environment that is welcoming and “safe”, where your readers can confidently share their thoughts. Ask questions. Encourage comments and once other readers react to their comment, let them know so that they can keep the conversation thread going. Of course, you also need to monitor to prevent inappropriate content. The interaction among readers may even create bonds among your community, as they agree, disagree or discuss your content. When the comments are directed to your organization or the writer, be sure to respond to the comments.
• Provide give-aways, freebies and contest prizes. Prizes and giveaways are effective tools for strengthening engagement opportunities. You can give out freebies for the first 100 or so “likes” or “follows” on your social media accounts. You can provide raffle entries to those who will comment on a particular blog post.
• Make it easy for your readers to engage. Get rid of barriers that prevent them from commenting or signing up. One major barrier is a long and intimidating sign up form that they have to fill up before they can make a comment. Give them the option to sign up only if they want to.
• Make it easy for your readers to share your content. Add share buttons for the most popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. However, direct social media conversations back to your website where you point followers of your social media profile to your website when they want to comment.
• Add graphics and video content from time to time. These improve the readers’ experience of your blog and make it easier for your readers to process content. Text-based articles are useful but are more passive since articles let the readers do the job of reading.
• Encourage new readers to do some back-reading. For each new post, link related blog entries that new readers can read. This enables them to stay longer in your website and see more of your content.

About Adaptivity Pro

Entrust your Utah SEO and social network marketing requirements only to experienced experts such as Adaptivity Pro. We provide strategies that enhance reader engagement and interaction. We also have a team of creative writers and SLC SEO specialists to help you produce regular content as well as brainstorm ways to attract readers into your website and blog.